Subjective Histories of Sculpture: Nairy Baghramian

Thu, Mar 15, 2012, 6:30–8:30pm

The New School, Theresa Lang Community and Student Center
55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor

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SculptureCenter, in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, is excited to continue the artist-led lecture series Subjective Histories of Sculpture. This program, initiated in 2006, furthers SculptureCenter's exploration of how contemporary artists think about sculpture; its history and its legacies. This year, three artists have been invited to present their own take on art history: Lucy Skaer, Nairy Baghramian, and Josephine Meckseper. Citing specific works, bodies of work, texts, or even personal anecdotes taken from inside and outside cultural production, and inside and outside art, these subjective, incomplete, partial, or otherwise eclectic histories question assumptions and propose alternative methods for understanding sculpture's evolving strategies.

Working in sculptural installations and photography, Nairy Baghramian engages interior design, literature, and art historical debates around minimalism in order to comment on current issues of materiality, manufacture, and display. Her practice examines political and social systems of power, encompassing questions of context, institutional framing and the production and reception of contemporary art. Baghramian's work possesses a sense of immediacy that favors the physicality of the object itself. Baghramian's sleek, polished aluminum pieces and cast rubber forms taken on a corporeal identity, often arranged in intimate mise en scenes to highlight the absence of a body while imbuing the forms themselves with a degree of bodily presence.

Nairy Baghramian was born in Isfahan, Iran in 1971, and currently lives and works in Berlin. Baghramian's recent exhibitions include Illuminations at the 54th Venice Biennale; a two person show with Phyllida Barlow at Serpentine Gallery in London, Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Aachen; Entr'acte, at Sculpture Project Munster 07 and the Kunsthalle Basel.